A good week overall and did my first refeed on Saturday. Hit about 2700 calories and over 350 carbs. Weight spiked about four pounds the next day. Hit a pretty low amount of calories on Sunday and had increased soreness from my workout the next day. The refeed must have wiped out my appetite the next day and Sunday is usually pretty busy for me overall. I bumped my calories up to about 12 calories per pound for the rest of the week due to my high volume of training. Weight dropped slightly overall this week, but nothing special.

Due to a hectic schedule at work I took rests day Monday and Tuesday. Tuesday was a bad day overall for my routine / nutrition. I was working the whole day at a different location and didn’t have time to eat lunch or breakfast. So I had a huge dinner to compensate for my missed meals, but only hit 1800 calories. Wednesday’s workout was with a coworker, which was actually really good. We did a push workout and we were around the same strength on bench press. My coworker usually lifts in the morning about 3 times each week, so I invited him to work out with me one evening after work. The workout took about 1 hour and 15 minutes, but it was a good one. I really enjoy working out with other people sometimes instead of doing it alone all the time. I hit pull the next day and legs on Friday. Squats still feel weak for some reason and I had a huge drop off in strength. I hit about 210lbs for my countdown set, but it was still lower than normal. The biggest problem with taking Monday ad Tuesday off is I have to lift 5 days in a row, which I don’t like doing from a recovery standpoint, but I’ll just raise my calories to compensate.

I plan on bumping up my calories to about bw x 12-13 for these next two weeks. Although the Holidays can sometimes go much higher than planned, so I may need a low day somewhere in the week to balance it out. 😉

Workout Logs: – The second pull workout listed twice:

Nutrition:

Been reading a lot of suppversity.com lately and I really like the authors articles even though some are pretty meaningless to lean athletic people. I did a lot of digging through all of his articles and some are hard to read and understand, but a couple few peaked my interest.

One was about de novo lipogenesis (the process of converting carbs to fat tissue) in humans. It was done on 3 men that massively overfed on carbs for 3 days. It concluded that once their glycogen stores were fully saturated (meaning their muscles and liver were completely stocked, which takes about 500 grams of carbs for most people) it took 475 grams of carbs (1900 calories) to store 150 grams of fat (1350 calories) over their maintenance intake. That means that 550 calories were “lost” in the process of converting carbs into fat. When trying to add muscle without fat, this is good news. Instead of overfeeding on 475 excess carbs do a little math and you can avoid the fat spillover. EX – 1900 -1350 = 550 calories — 550 calories / 4 = 138 grams of carbs for your surplus over maintenance levels. This is also once glycogen storage is maxed out. If your glycogen stores aren’t full then the body will always fill it up before contributing to muscle gain. You could get away with more carbs than 138 grams over maintenance if you had a really hard workout. It does show you that you can get fat off too many carbs, but its definitely not the most efficient process in the world. One thing to keep in mind though when eating that many carbs is your weight will jump up big time due to the water retention effect of carbs. So your weight may spike, but not your body fat, which is the most important thing to keep an eye on. Also, this shows you the importance of not fulking (fat bulking) and eating everything in sight. Past a certain point (roughly 500 cals depending on individual) any more surplus calories and your looking at nothing but fat gain.

Another from suppversity was about high protein diets. I have always been a fan of high protein diets, because I find them satisfying and delicious. Especially with all the protein powder flavors they have now and I just have a much easier time controlling calories, staying lean and keeping my energy high this way. But he said if you eat a lot of protein like between 1-1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight then you need to make sure you hit at least a minimum of carbs and fat to keep up training performance, mood and most importantly to prevent protein from being used an energy source. He concluded about 30% calories from carbs need to be eaten and at least 20% from fat. So your macro split would be 50/30/20 protein/carbs/fat. No less for carbs and fat or you may notice some negative repercussions. This macro split would work for fat loss, especially due to the very high thermic effect of protein, which is not to be underestimated, but when trying to hit high calorie intakes of lets say 2500 calories or higher, then the protein intake becomes too high and you’d be much healthier by eating more carbs and fat to replace some of the protein.

Another interesting article was by Jade Teta. He speaks more to fat and sedentary people for his audience, but he has some very interesting articles on metabolic damage. I think metabolic damage is real, even though its overplayed sometimes, but it was about cortisol. Cortisol should not be too low or too high or nasty side effects result. He basically recommends two paths to fat loss. The lazy way of eat less, move less. Meaning if you sedentary then you can get away with some really low calorie intakes without nasty side effects. Although I still feel like this way leads to reductions in metabolic rate and is not the best way to go. The other is eat more exercise more. This means if you lift 6 days a week and are active then you calories need to be much higher even if you goal if fat loss. This prevents the nasty side effects of too much cortisol, one of these effects being halted fat loss and maybe even fat storage (especially for visceral fat) and also low testosterone / muscle building hormones. He never recommends eating more and exercise less (unless fat gain is the goal ;)) or eating less and exercising more. These are two things that do not make sense and the results will not be good.

Ex – if you burn 2800 calories a day then eat at least 2000 calories a day or no more than 30% decrease from maintenance. Do not burn 2800 calories a day and eat 1200 calories a day. Again it may look like the ultimate fat burn on paper, but its not a good idea.

I read a lot more than that this week, but these were some pretty awesome highlights. Not sure why, but I could sit there and read nutritional research all day. It just interests me for some reason. Nutrition more so than exercise.

It was an overfeeding study and the men overfed on carbs for a many days in a row. After a certain point of this, the men started to store 150 grams of fat (1350 calories) that was converted from overeating on 475 grams of carbs (1900 calories). Meaning de novo lipogensis was able to store most of the calories as fat that came from the excess carbs the men were eating, but 550 calories went missing and were not converted to fat. That means if the men had scaled back to only overfeeding on 138 grams of carbs (550 calories) worth, then they may have avoided fat gain.